Accountability is Not ‘Political Retribution’ – It is Justice

[INSIDE JW]

ACCOUNTABILITY IS NOT ‘POLITICAL RETRIBUTION’ – IT IS JUSTICE

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In my column for _The Washington Times_, I write how the law must be
applied fairly:

> In America, the rule of law depends upon there being one system of
> justice for the entire country, but let’s be honest: Until now,
> that hasn’t been true.
>
> The Washington establishment has operated under a double standard:
> One for them and another for everyone else. James B. Comey
>
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Letitia
> “Tish” James
>
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and John R.
> Bolton
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all
> now targeted for or under indictment, are not victims of
> “retribution,” as the leftist media and Democrats loudly claim.
> They are facing long-overdue accountability for alleged criminal
> misconduct tied to abuse of power, deception and the weaponization
> of government against political opponents and the rule of law
> itself.
>
> The liberal media’s narrative of “revenge” is a convenient
> distraction. It ignores the years of documented misconduct that
> helped erode public trust in our institutions — much of which
> Judicial Watch exposed through litigation and investigations. These
> cases aren’t about politics; they are about restoring equal
> justice and integrity to the system that the political left
> corrupted.
>
> The indictment of Mr. Comey, a former FBI director, on charges of
> obstruction of a congressional proceeding and making false
> statements, should come as no surprise to those who have followed
> the man’s record. Judicial Watch uncovered evidence that the FBI
> retrieved personal memos from Mr. Comey after he left office, which
> he had either leaked or kept without authorization. We obtained
> documents showing that he coordinated with Robert Mueller’s team
> before his 2017 testimony and used his office to promote a baseless
> case against President Trump.
>
> Mr. Comey lied, leaked and obstructed, all to manipulate
> investigations and preserve the anti-Trump narrative. Now, when he
> is finally called to answer for those actions, his attorneys accuse
> Mr. Trump of “personal animus.” That’s nonsense. These charges
> stem from his own misconduct, not from politics. Accountability
> isn’t retribution; it’s the law doing what it should have done
> years ago.
>
> Ms. James made her political career by campaigning on the promise to
> “get Trump.” She smeared him as an “illegitimate president”
> and then weaponized her position as New York attorney general to
> pursue baseless civil charges against Mr. Trump and his company.
> Even a leftist-dominated appellate court in New York rejected Ms.
> James’ abuse of Mr. Trump and knocked out the abusive fines she
> sought.
>
> Now, when Ms. James herself faces charges of bank fraud and lying to
> a financial institution, the same media that cheered her partisan
> crusade portray her as a victim. It’s hypocrisy. The rule of law
> doesn’t stop applying when the accused is a Democrat with elite
> connections. For now, the courts have shut down the indictments of
> Mr. Comey and Ms. James for dubious reasons, but the underlying
> charges are rightly still being pursued.
>
> Then there’s the self-styled “guardian” of national security,
> Mr. Bolton, who, according to federal prosecutors, mishandled and
> unlawfully transmitted classified defense information more than a
> dozen times. More than 1,000 pages of national defense material
> leaked through his personal accounts, with reckless disregard for
> security. For years, Mr. Bolton
>
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cast himself
> as a “truth teller” against Mr. Trump. Now, he faces 18 federal
> counts for behavior that placed real intelligence at risk.
>
> Everyone with a security clearance knows full well the consequences
> of publicizing classified information. Mr. Bolton apparently thought
> the law didn’t apply to him. Once again, the “system” is
> finally holding a powerful insider accountable.
>
> Mr. Trump’s critics, now joined by the same media that cheered
> lawfare against him for years, claim these indictments mark a
> dangerous precedent. Yet the real danger lies in pretending that
> elites such as Messrs. Comey and Bolton and Ms. James are above the
> law. For years, they targeted citizens and political opponents using
> the machinery of justice as a weapon. They normalized selective
> prosecution. The current cases simply return the law to its
> rightful, impartial place.
>
> Abigail Jackson, spokeswoman for the Trump White House, put it
> plainly in September: “It is the highest form of hypocrisy for
> Democrats and the media to falsely claim accountability is
> ‘political retribution’” after years of weaponizing the entire
> Biden administration. When one side systematically abuses power,
> restoring accountability will always look like retribution to those
> who benefited from corruption.
>
> Sunlight is the best disinfectant. The law must apply equally,
> whether your name is Donald Trump, James Comey or John Bolton. Mr.
> Trump’s administration is not seeking revenge; it is repairing
> justice. That restoration is not tyranny. It is the republic’s
> renewal.

COURT HEARING HELD FOR DC POLICE BODYCAM FOOTAGE FROM JANUARY 6, 2021

We were in court yesterday for a hearing
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before D.C. Superior Court Judge Carl E. Ross in a Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the District of Columbia for
local police bodycam footage from January 6, 2021.

We filed the June 2024 FOIA lawsuit
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in the U.S.
District Court for the District of Columbia after the Metropolitan
Police Department (MPD) denied our August 2021 request (_Judicial
Watch v. District of Columbia_
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(No. 2024-CAB-003453)). We are seeking all footage captured by the
body-worn cameras of police department officers who responded to the
Capitol on January 6.

The Metropolitan Police Department continues to withhold the January 6
footage because it claims that the faces and voices of every
individual who is not law enforcement personnel in the videos for
personal privacy reasons. Because of this, the police department seeks
to charge
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us
more than $1.5 million so that the police department can redact those
faces and voices in the videos, which supposedly contain over one
thousand hours of footage.

In a September 2025 filing
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we argue that DC’s claim of FOIA’s personal privacy redaction
requirement is wrong because no privacy interest exists – and even
if it did exist any privacy interest is outweighed by the public’s
interest in this case:

> [Metropolitan Police Department’s bodycam] footage from January 6,
> 2021 captured a public event on public property. The footage does
> not reveal private financial information, hospital admission
> records, social security numbers, medical records or similar
> materials. The [bodycam] footage only consists of faces and voices
> that were seen and/or heard by anyone present on public property or
> has seen other images/videos captured that day. There is nothing
> whatsoever private about the faces and voices….

> If the Court were to find that more than a _de minimis _privacy
> interest is implicated by the unredacted disclosure of the [bodycam]
> footage, the obvious public interest outweighs it.... [L]ike the
> release of footage from the Capitol surveillance cameras, the
> release of [the police department’s bodycam] footage “will
> provide millions of Americans, criminal defendants, public interest
> organizations, and the media an ability to see for themselves what
> happened that day, rather than having to rely upon the
> interpretation of a small group of government officials.” See X
> post here
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There is no good reason to hide these videos from January 6, and we
will continue our fight five years later for the public’s right to
see the unedited footage.

We have extensively investigated the events of January 6.

In July 2025, we sued
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the U.S.
Department of Justice for records on accelerated January 6
prosecutions after Donald Trump was elected president in November
2024. The Biden administration, anticipating President-elect Donald
Trump’s promise to issue pardons for January 6, 2021, defendants, is
believed to have accelerated prosecutions in the final months of
Biden’s term.

In August 2025, we announced that the U.S. Air Force would finally
provide full military funeral honors
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to Ashli
Babbitt, the Air Force veteran who was shot and killed inside the U.S.
Capitol by then-Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd on January 6, 2021.
Babbitt was the only official January 6 homicide victim. The Biden
administration had previously denied Babbitt and her family these
honors in retaliation for being at the U.S. Capitol that day. This
decision came on the heels of a massive, nearly $5 million Trump
administration settlement
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with her family for wrongful death and other claims against the U.S.
Government.

Also in August, a Georgia state court issued an order
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in our
lawsuit for Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis to provide new
information and potentially conduct a new search for Trump-related
records because her affidavit to the court made no reference to
whether any searches of the devices of former Fulton County Special
Prosecutor Nathan Wade or those of Chief Investigator Michael L. Hill,
who was involved gathering evidence and coordinating investigative
efforts, and likely met
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with the January 6 Committee.

In May 2025, we sued
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the U.S. Department of War for records regarding a reported 2021
meeting between then-Attorney General Merrick Garland and
then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley during
which they discussed President Trump. During the meeting, Milley is
alleged to have pressured Garland to target “far-right” militia
movements (_Judicial Watch Inc. v. U.S. Department of Defense_
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_(No.
1:25-cv-01330)).

In April 2025, we filed
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a FOIA lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service to obtain records
related to possible improper targeting of January 6, 2021, Capitol
protesters, their supporters, and related nonprofits (_Judicial Watch
v. Internal Revenue Service_
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(No. 1:25-cv-01290)).

In February 2025, Judicial Watch sued
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the War Department
for information about two conference calls involving then-Chairman of
the Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley with the Departments of Justice,
Interior and Homeland Security regarding coordination for the January
6, 2021, election certification (_Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of
Defense_
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(No. 1:25-cv-00439)).

In December 2024, we sued
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the
Justice Department for details of a reported meeting between Attorney
General Merrick Garland and. Milley in which they discussed President
Trump and during which General Milley pressured Garland to target
American “far right” militia movements (_Judicial Watch Inc. v.
U.S. Department of Justice_
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(No. 1:24-cv-03380)).



MEDICAID MAKES $289 MILLION IN “UNALLOWABLE PAYMENTS” TO DEAD
PEOPLE

Recent events in Minnesota have made it clear that your tax dollars
are carelessly tossed hither and yon. This is particularly true with
Medicaid, as our _Corruption Chronicles_ blog reports
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> A decade after Judicial Watch reported
>
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> that Medicaid, the government’ s fraud-infested health insurance
> program for the needy, spent $26 million to provide dead people in
> one state alone with benefits, a federal audit reveals the problem
> continues full-throttle with hundreds of millions of dollars in
> “unallowable payments” on behalf of “deceased enrollees.” It
> is an unbelievable story that illustrates government inefficiency,
> especially when it involves welfare programs. The waste has been
> well documented for many years, yet little has been done to correct
> the problem. With an annual budget of about $900 billion Medicaid is
> jointly funded by federal and state governments. The Centers for
> Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) administers the program at the
> federal level and states have CMS-approved plans to run their
> Medicaid programs, which provide low-income residents with medical
> coverage. In some states the government contracts with insurance
> companies and makes fixed monthly payments to provide coverage.
>
> For years, the payments have continued even after the patient died.
> In other cases, millions of dollars of “unallowable payments”
> are made on behalf of incarcerated individuals, who lose Medicaid
> benefits once they are imprisoned because healthcare is provided by
> correction facilities. In a recent example, Illinois spent at least
> $9.5 million
>
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> to provide ineligible inmates, who had been enrolled in Medicaid
> prior to incarceration, with medical benefits. As in many states,
> the Illinois Department of Corrections Prison Data Match
> collaborates with Medicaid Managed Care Enrollment Termination to
> provide a weekly list of incarcerated individuals, and the
> information is matched against the state’s Medicaid enrollment
> data to identify incarcerated enrollees, so Medicaid benefits are
> terminated. Although the system has been in place nationwide for
> years, a recent Health and Human Services (HHS) Inspector General
> (IG) probe examined Illinois records and determined that, between
> 2020 and 2023, at least $9.5 million in unallowable payments were
> made on behalf of imprisoned Medicaid recipients because the state
> failed to terminate managed care enrollment after being notified of
> incarceration.
>
> The failure is similar involving dead people, though the price tag
> is much higher. Since 2016 the HHS IG has conducted 18 audits
> identifying that Medicaid agencies improperly made about $289
> million
>
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in
> payments on behalf of recipients after they died. Even after all
> these years, “states continue to struggle with the issue,”
> according to the recently published audit. Investigators found that
> Medicaid agencies throughout the country doled out the money for the
> healthcare of deceased beneficiaries even though the deaths were
> officially recorded in the Social Security Administration’s Death
> Master File. In most cases the cash kept flowing, the HHS watchdog
> confirms, writing that “we determined that Medicaid agencies made
> unallowable capitation payments after enrollees’ deaths for 99 of
> the 100 sample payments.” Some of the overpayments were recovered
> by the government but the overwhelming majority were not, sticking
> it to American taxpayers as so many bloated welfare programs
> regularly do.
>
> Improper payments have been a long-standing and significant problem
> in the federal government, according to the Government
> Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, and
> Medicaid is among the biggest offenders. In fiscal year 2024 the GAO
> found that Medicaid made an estimated $31.1 billion
>
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in improper payments,
> which is equal to about five percent of the program’s total
> spending. A year earlier the HHS watchdog reported that 14 states
> made over $249 million in unallowable payments on behalf of dead
> people with 11 of those failing to consistently identify and process
> beneficiaries’ death information. A few years ago, an Oregon state
> audit revealed that $445 million in Medicaid benefits were paid to
> beneficiaries enrolled in one or more other states, including tens
> of millions for people covered under California and Washington
> state’s Medicaid program.

NIH TO RECONSIDER FROZEN DEI, GENDER IDENTITY GRANTS WORTH MILLIONS

Feeding at the federal trough continues, with various leftwing groups
and officials fighting in court to retain a grab bag of questionable
grants. Our _Corruption Chronicles_ blog explains
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> A portion of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) grants frozen or
> denied by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) last year will be
> reviewed and possibly reinstated by the Trump administration to
> appease the left. Worth hundreds of millions of dollars, the
> rejected grants also fund research related to LGBTQ+ and transgender
> issues as well as gender identity, areas of study that do not meet
> the administration’s priorities. That is why last spring the NIH,
> which invests most of its $48 billion budget
>
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>
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medical
> research, nixed grants flagged for DEI, transgender, LGBTQ+ and
> other leftist projects that received large sums of taxpayer dollars
> under Biden. Some were buried among the 50,000 grants the NIH awards
> annually to more than 300,000 researchers at over 2,500 universities
> and medical schools nationwide, but the Trump administration plucked
> them out and revoked them. Thousands of grants worth billions of
> dollars were targeted over DEI, gender identity and LGBTQ+ research.
>
> Predictably, legal action ensued and several lawsuits were filed by
> researchers, unions, civil rights groups and a coalition of
> Democratic states that saw $783 million in frozen DEI grants. That
> federal lawsuit, filed by attorneys general in Massachusetts,
> California, Maryland, Washington, Arizona, Colorado, Delaware,
> Hawaii, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon,
> Rhode Island and Wisconsin alleges the Trump administration violated
> the U.S. Constitution and the Administrative Procedure Act by
> unreasonably delaying the review and disposition of applications for
> NIH grants submitted by researchers. Another lawsuit
>
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> filed by a leftwing civil right group, says a plaintiff whose
> research focuses on sexual violence in minority communities had six
> grants terminated and another that studied the promotion of mental
> and physical health among black men. An Ivy League professor lost
> her NIH grant focusing on obstetrical outcomes for lesbian, gay,
> bisexual and queer women, while another frozen award funded research
> on the mental health impacts of laws targeting the LGBTQ+
> population.
>
> In the case filed by the states, a trial court and an appeals court
> in Massachusetts sided with the attorneys general, but the U.S.
> Supreme Court later ruled
>
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>
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> the trial judge lacked the authority to compel the grants to be
> paid. The states asked the Supreme Court to leave the lower
> court’s order in place, claiming that the termination of the DEI
> grants “caused unrecoverable loss of scientific knowledge” and
> would inflict incalculable losses in public health and human life.
> The high court did not agree with its 5-4 decision setting aside the
> lower court rulings and allowing the Trump administration to cancel
> hundreds of millions of dollars in NIH grants involving DEI. The
> ruling certainly makes it tougher for grant recipients who challenge
> the Trump administration’s changes to federal funding based on its
> new DEI and gender identity policies. The Supreme Court decision
> undoubtedly gives the government the upper hand to withhold taxpayer
> dollars for research that involves wasteful projects prioritized by
> the previous administration.
>
> That makes the Trump administration’s decision to review and
> possibly reinstate the canceled DEI grants puzzling. In a settlement
> agreement
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> recently signed by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the attorneys
> general who sued the administration, the NIH agrees to consider
> hundreds of grants worth $783 million without taking into account
> DEI. The document was filed in Massachusetts federal court on Dec.
> 29 and the state’s attorney general, Andrea Joy Campbell, calls it
> a victory against unlawful directives
>
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> that targeted NIH projects based on their perceived connection to
> DEI, transgender issues, vaccine hesitancy and other topics
> disfavored by the Trump administration. Under the agreement NIH
> officials “will complete their consideration of the Applications
> in the ordinary course of NIH’s scientific review process, without
> applying the Challenged Directives.” This clearly refers to the
> Trump administration’s ban on funding controversial DEI,
> transgender and gender identity research. The NIH also commits to
> “evaluate each application individually and in good faith.”

Until next week,



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